On The Margins

Tuesday October 30, 2007

[ Philosophy ] Moral Compass and Information

We have a clear proof today that abundance and "free" flow of "news" and "information"—yes, much of it manufactured for nefarious purposes of one kind or another, and yet much of it potentially relevant—does not make a nation morally wise to understand simple facts like the plain immorality of bringing occupation, death and destruction to people thousands of miles away. 

We also have a proof that, through manufactured fear, a nation can be aroused to a frenzy, easily disarmed of its simplest moral sense and compass and made to abandon its most fundamental social skill—placing oneself in the shoes of others. 

No technology can inoculate a people against such a moral disease—a disease that can only be prevented and eradicated through "moral education," to borrow McMurray's phrase.

2007-10-30 04:48:02.0 -- Comments [5] ; Permalink ; Trackback.
information moral-sense reciprocity technology

Sunday September 23, 2007

[ Philosophy ] Science and Leibniz

How does science answer Leibniz' famous question: "Why is there not nothing?"

2007-09-23 23:06:37.0 -- Comments [6] ; Permalink ; Trackback.
philosophy science technology

Tuesday August 07, 2007

[ Philosophy ] Do Facts Exist?

Of course they do, if we are ever able to get our heads and hands around them.

We get our heads and hands around them when we interpret them for their light, their significance, if we ever apply our given facilities and capacity to do so.

What matters even more are the large number of consistent interpretations for any given body of facts. The enormously vast majority of these interpretations (of the same body of facts) will be mutually contradictory. The non-mutually-contradictory interpretations are merely expansions of a series of existing ones, encapsulating and imprisoning each other like Russian dolls. They reveal nothing new. They disclose nothing new. Instead, they simply envelope themselves in themselves, using larger and larger envelopes.

What matters even more is that facts have no life without interpretations.

The interpretations one chooses will define how one will live in this world and in other worlds....and even there, your interpretation will differ from mine....but at a certain moment of destiny for these interpretations, the imaginary gap will close itself, and they will merge towards the ever returning.
 

2007-08-07 20:57:39.0 -- Comments [4] ; Permalink ; Trackback.
existence facts interpretations philosophy

Wednesday June 06, 2007

[ Philosophy ] Truth -- What's Consistency Got To Do With It?

Frege used a 2-D notation for his logic.

Many years ago, while with the Graduate Group in Logic and Methodology of Science at Berkeley, I had written a little paper with a tease of a title: "Consistency--What Is Logic Got To Do With It?" After a recent discussion, I realized more clearly how that paper might have been making too far of a leap in logic. Perhaps, it should have been named "Consistency--What Is Truth Got To Do With It?"  By "consistency," all along, I had meant "consistency" as understood by mathematicians and scientists, not what we understand "consistency" to be when we speak of, say, "consistent" behavior, which is a totally different concept when compared to a "consistent" theory.

In the mathematicians' definition of truth, as expounded by Alfred Tarski, one can only speak of "truth" within the confines of a mathematically "consistent" theory. Thus, one arrives, in mathematical logic, at incomplete theories that meet mathematical "truth" criteria even as they remain incomplete. In a sense, their incompleteness is more true about these theories than their "truth." Their "truth" exists within their limited, incomplete domain, which, always remains positively finite or countable or of much lower cardinality than the continuum of claims that they can neither prove nor disprove.

2007-06-06 22:50:55.0 -- Comments [7] ; Permalink ; Trackback.
consistency logic mathematics papers philosophy

Thursday May 17, 2007

[ Philosophy ] Transitions

Everything transitions from one form to another through stages. In a play, a character may transition from hope, to frustrated ambitions to bitterness and despair. Death itself comes as a transition. Thus, does Leonardo da Vinci describe, in his Notebooks [as quoted by Lajos Egri], the transition to death:

... And this old man, a few hours before his death, told me that he had lived a hundred years, and that he did not feel any bodily ailment other than weakness, and thus, while sitting up on a bed in the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova at Florence, without any movement or sign of anything amiss, he passed away from this life. And I made an autopsy in order to ascertain the cause of so peaceful a death, and found that it proceeded from weakness throgh failure of blood and of the artery that feeds the heart and the other lower members, which I found to be very parched and shrunk and withered, and the result of his autopsy I wrote down very carefully and with great ease, for the body was devoid of either fat or moisture, and these form the chief hindrance to the knowledge of its parts ... The old who enjoy good health die through lack of sustenance. And this is brought about by the passage to the mesaraic veins becoming continually restricted by the thickening of the skin of those veins and the process continues until it affects the capillary veins which are the first to close up altogether; and from this it comes to pass that the old dread the cold more than the young, and that those who are very old have their skin the color of wood or dried chestnut, because this is almost compeltely deprived of sustenance.

What is in this description that makes it such a more revealing read that today's medical treatise on aging and death?

2007-05-17 00:30:58.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
transitions

Wednesday March 28, 2007

[ Philosophy ] Delusion in the Delusion

One could logically demonstrate vast parts of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion to be nothing but delusion.

Man can exist without science but the story of science has no existence without man—the being who created it as a refuge, a very poor one indeed, and at best a means to better comprehend a tiny aspect of the universe in order to appreciate the greatness that surrounds him.

2007-03-28 22:28:35.0 -- Comments [15] ; Permalink ; Trackback.
philosophy science theology

Monday February 19, 2007

[ Philosophy ] Conflict and Self

People distrust strangers. Only in conflict can you "prove" yourself. In conflict your true self is revealed. On the stage, as well as in life, every one is a stranger who does not first "prove" himself. A person who stands by you in adversity is a proven person. Even an illiterate knows that politeness and smart talk are not signs of sincerity or friendship. But sacrifice is...

...Since most of us play possum and hide our true selves from the world, we are interested in witnessing the things happening to those who are forced to reveal their true characters under the stress of conflict... In conflict we are forced to reveal ourselves. It seems that self-revelation of others or ourselves holds a fatal fascination for everyone.

                                                       Lajos Egri, The Art of Dramatic Writing

While most can agree with Egri that conflict provides one medium for self-revelation, they may also see that community and care could provide similar media. In fact, all these aspects are bound up together. For example, community incorporates, in its very institution, passageways for a variety of conflicts and their resolution. However, one thing remains certain and confirms Egri's viewpoint. In the crucible of conflicts, characters reveal themselves most revealingly. We may extend our human observation and note that embedded in every conflict, justice will show its weight and import regardless of the apparent justice of a specific resolution.

2007-02-19 22:38:43.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
community conflict self

Friday January 26, 2007

[ Philosophy ] Care

Greatest stupidity occurs not when a country is invaded or a space-craft explodes as it takes off but when care is not returned.

2007-01-26 08:44:35.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
care philosophy

Sunday January 07, 2007

[ Philosophy ] To Will One Thing

The theme and objective of certain parts of Sören Kierkegaard's Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing reminds me of the same in certain sufi texts including some very early ones such as Al-Gazzali's The Alchemy of Happniess. Both bring attention to material we often ignore. Kierkegaard positions his work primarily to respond to the distractions of modern life and to awaken commitment. For the same purpose, Al-Gazzali takes sure steps to unfold the compendium of sacred knowledge already available in the midst of his world. The former still insists in adopting a philosophical language. The latter puts pure philosophical methods behind him to reach a community.

2007-01-07 00:30:55.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
europe philosophy theosophy

Monday December 18, 2006

[ Philosophy ] Securing Property Rights

In cultured societies¹, the state secures personal property against wanton takeover. Such protection encourages personal investment in productive social activity.

In a sense, private property becomes, and indeed is, sacred.

Nowhere is this more clear than the severe, albeit varying punishment vetted against thieves in various cultures and societies throughout history.

For example, consider the law in the U.S. that called for the execution of a man who stole the horse of another. Presumably, stealing a horse could be tantamount to stealing another's livelihood if not his or her life. As another example, if some score of  conditions hold, a thief of a personal property might lose a limb--starting with a piece of a finger--according to the sharia law. One of those score of hard-to-meet conditions that must exist for this particular law to apply involves a lack of a survival need to steal. So, the punishment may apply to a Wall Street magnet who has provenly and intentionally stolen from an old lady's pension or some orphans' trust, wrecking their lives as a consequence, but will not apply to a hungry beggar who takes an apple. 

Furthermore, and beyond the proofs in stipulated punishments, we have the proof in taboos against taking what belongs to others. These taboos run deep. For example, consider the emphasis, in both Jewish and Islamic law, regarding payment of debt as a religious obligation. Most reasonable people experience the relevant acculturation and live by these taboos and commendations.

Without the protection of private property, no one can be expected to give of his own or contribute anything for she or he will receive nothing of worth in return. There would be no incentive to contribute anything of worth without the protection of private property and rights in what is of worth. The history of the artificial beliefs in the sanctity of communal property extending to all things worth owning makes it quite clear that when incentives of private ownership disappear, people stop contributing willingly.

However, all protection of private and personal "property" has come at a price. States levy taxes on assets presumably to compensate themselves for cost of securing the conditions for ownership of such assets. The owners pay taxes and return something to the society that harbored their ownership rights. There are similar limits in other cases.

While IP and copyrights have been treated by some as private property, the protections granted to them had a different purpose. It was not an eternal protection but simply a safeguard for a limited time in order to grant the creative forces some security so that they may achieve and earn a return on the novelty they had created. Indefinite or long-term protection would create other problems such as slow propagation of novel ideas and innovations, not to mention the cost of enforcing such "rights." However, there were limits imposed on the duration of such protection in order to return the ideas to the mix of the community that had helped foster them. 

Lawrence Lessig has written enough about this topic, and today, in The Wall Street Journal, we read how sums are invested for the very protection of copyrights. ("Copyright Tool Will Scan Web for Violations," WSJ, December 18, 2006, Page B1.)

When a society pays more for securing what only needs limited protection, it increases its cumulative transaction costs at a time when better, lower-cost, alternatives exist for safeguarding what needs protecting. (This forumla also holds with aggressive wars as a means to provide "security" or with dubious prisons and gulags as a means to provide "justice." These techniques remind us of the analogy of a hammer used to kill a fly. Indeed, they are far worse.)

To the extent creative commons get a chance to grow beyond a certain threshold, we are in a position to see a more free culture. Cultural production means creating new cultural products against and upon what history has handed to us. To the extent that history can be frozen in a particular era by some few owners of its cultural products, we stand to suffer because we lose our flexibility as a cultured community to respond to the changes that go on around us.

^Notes

^{1. The phrase "cultured societies" reads like an oxymoron. No society can exist in the long run without a culture to sustain it. Perhaps, I should have said in "Sustainable societies". Then again, we aree dealing with a bit of a tautology here. Without culture a society cannot be sustained, and no society is sustainable without culture.}

2006-12-18 17:03:05.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
copyrights costs culture economics law personal philosophy private property punishment religion transactions

Friday October 27, 2006

[ Philosophy ] Modes of Perception

Some scientisms claim that there's no truth out in the world to be found and that we simply have some descriptions, in science, of what is going on, at any given time during the course of the evolution of science as a human activity. While this claim has its proponents, it does not quite jive with the reality of human existential experience, a good part of which seems to be summed up in understanding the truth of what is out there.

Although proponents of various scientisms may deny such existential experience, all human beings seem to experience it given some level of maturity and emotional preparation. So, in philosophical discourse, some philosophers are keen on talking of prephilosophical understanding or perception. For example, in the preface to his The Tasks of Philosophy, Alasdair MacIntyre writes:

This kind of view is not unique to McIntyre or the strand of Western philosophy to which he belongs.

Very recently and quite accidentally I got hold of a translation of a theosophical treatise prepared by a Berkeley scholar of Islam and Persian which opens up and addresses the same question.

For other writings by Hamid Algar, see here.

2006-10-27 22:51:55.0 -- Comments [2] ; Permalink ; Trackback.
perception philosophy

Sunday September 10, 2006

[ Philosophy ] Opinion as Worthless

Opinion, ultimately, is quite worthless. Real-world experience, on the other hand, has worth in "gold," some say, although this may also be an exaggeration.

Here's the other side: In a letter my father wrote to me in my 30s, when I had said I had finally come to realize the importance of experience, he noted that "experience does not help either." He seemed to be saying that there was some other source of guidance or that we had no such guidance.

Personal commitment and belief seem to come into the picture. Unless we commit something of ourselves, something that's of value to us, we're making no real transformations of anything.

Mental transformation ultimately flows from real-world interaction in the physical world.

So for example, it's better to go to a place and live there than to keep having opinions about it.

Once you commit your body, your opinions might change!

2006-09-10 22:10:15.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
opinion philosophy truth

Monday July 31, 2006

[ Philosophy ] Truth Criteria

[Note: Paul Hinz' entry, which draws a distinction between facts and opinions, motivated me to write the following little essay.]

Truth criteria is a very touchy-feely topic in epistemology, not to mention mathematical logic and ontology on two other extreme poles.

For example, in mathematical logic, Alfred Tarski had a model-theoretic criteria of truth for statements expressed in a given mathematical language. Anyone who knows about Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorem and non-standard models knows where that definition will lead us.

"Facts" will always depend on the model of the world that one is dealing with and using to establish truth of statements.

In some models, a mathematical statement may be true and in others it may be false. In smaller models, the truth or falsity of the same statement may not even be possible to establish through any proof mechanism.

Now, applying the same concept, on a philosophical level, to the real world should have its obvious conclusions. Let's leave that as an exercise.

I should also mention that common scientists are successful in defining "facts" and "truth" to their satisfaction because they deal with a very simple, fictitious world-model, established for their very narrow and  particular purpose.

Here's another take, for example, which is more on the ontological side.

"Facts" are what one believes in based on what one has come to know of the world. Here, one's take of what "the world" actually is becomes key. In life, the "world-model" one uses depends critically on what one has come to really understand about the world through one's life.

"Assumptions" are "facts" in which one believes more than one believes in other "facts."

Except for sterile "scientific facts" (these, on their own, are discovered through consensus and agreement more than anything else), one man's "fact" becomes another man's "falsehood"...because they see the world in completely different ways.

So, if we bank on settling of facts as the main problem and on distinguishing fact and opinion as the main resolution, we're badly under-funded when it comes to understanding what's really going on.

On the other hand, we can submit to our partial understanding and agree that the best we can do when there's disagreement is to try to understand the various sides of the disagreement to the greatest possible extent. Often, we're just too lazy to do so. We tend to dismiss one side outright because of our prejudices. Understanding others can hardly be easy. It requires an ability to grasp the others' life as a possible life of our own to live, according to Bernard Williams, the late Cambridge philosopher, with not all of whose opinions I must say I agree.

2006-07-31 17:37:31.0 -- Comments [2] ; Permalink ; Trackback.
epistemology logic morality ontology philosophy truth

Tuesday May 02, 2006

[ Philosophy ] Lecture on Zoroastrian Revelations

A colleague just pointed me to an upcoming lecture on Zoroastrian revelations and poetry.

Sponsored by the International and Comparative Studies Division at Stanford University, the lecture will be given by Professor Martin Schwartz of U.C. Berkeley.

I know Schwartz a bit through a seminar I took with him about a dozen years ago. (We had only three students in the seminar.)

Schwartz is very modest and a great professor in his field and he can have some very surprising stuff in his talks and public lectures. The best may be to take a seminar with him, if you can help it and are close to Berkeley. (I think this can be arranged through UC Extension for one of the official UC courses he teaches.)

The graduate seminar I took with Schwartz in Berkelely focused on a piece of Pahlavi text, some 1100 years old. We worked, specifically, on the first few pages of DeenKard, a Zoroastrian text of sacred knowledge collected by Zoroastrian scholars between 1400 to 1100 years ago. The text, if I remember correctly, while in middle Persian (Pahlavi) is written in Aramaic script.

We spent about a semester on 5 pages of DeenKard --- a time totally well spent and well deserved.

This was in spring of 1993 while I was doing graduate studies in logic and methodology of science at Berkeley. (L&MS was a gradudate group combining philosophy, math and computer science.)

Because I wanted to better understand scholarship on Deenkard, I took one year worth of intensive German in the summer of 1993.

I should also note that, concurrently with Schwartz' class, I was also taking a seminar in the philosophy department at Berkeley on "Ethics". In this philosophy course, we read about 2000 pages of western philosophical works on "ethics," and I can tell you with great confidence that I learned far more about ethics from those 5 pages of Pahlavi text in DeenKard than I did form 2000 pages moder philosophical works on ethics.

Here's the announcement for the May 11, 2006, lecture and a few paragraphs about Schwartz: " Revelations of Zarathushtra: Poetry of Mysteries, Mysteries of Poetry"

2006-05-02 10:43:26.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
ethics languages persian philosophy poetry zoroaster

Saturday March 25, 2006

[ Philosophy ] Edutopia

I don't know what to say about his political writings, but MIT's Michael Schrage's has touched on some important issues in his recent opinion piece for Financial Times, written on a controversial topic in which he seems to possess some expertise ("The 'edutainers' merit a failing grade," FT, March 22, 206, p. 13):

Yes, the internet is wonderful. Yes, children are our future. Yes, state-run school systems require fundamental reform. Nevertheless, the shrewdest policy to improve public education while saving billions in government spending demands abstinence. Keep computers out of the classroom.

The "edutopian" belief that computers should be essential ingredients of classroom curricula is delusional. A quality education has virtually nothing to do with the technological endowment of the school. To the contrary, history confirms that schools are shockingly poor at successfully assimilating new technologies.

...Look instead, perhaps, to technology as a medium that creatively redefines relationships between schools and their communities. In South Korea, for example, Seoul educational administrators recently announced that they would expand a mobile phone service that let teachers text parents the grades, schedules and homework assignments for their children. Korean mothers and fathers were apparently very enthusastic about this innovation.

In this, I hear some echos of John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid's The Social Life of Information but it seems to me Brown and Duguid have dug much deeper, and ultimately, it is best to just refer to Hubert Dreyfus' work, including Mind Over Machine.

2006-03-25 11:30:34.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
education information philosophy

Wednesday March 22, 2006

[ Philosophy ] What's Life Worth

Of course, life is worth a lot, and the closer it gets to us, the larger its worth tends to grow for us. If we fail to have any other moral imagination, we should be able to imagine that the same value principle should hold for others.

Sadly, much of philosophy, under the guise of special forms of utilitarianism, including some extreme types, has often avoided serious questions, particularly ones related to justice and morality.

Is killing (or even harming) one human being like killing (or harming) the whole humanity?

The answer to this moral question should be quite clear but the utilitarian talk of "collateral damage" and the talk of "judicious double standards" badly cloud the public's moral compass — a public that has divorced and forgotten the roots of its moral traditions.

March 22 report of The World, includes a segment where host Lisa Mullins speaks with Time Magazine reporter Tim McGirk who has looked into the the Haditha, Iraq case, in which 23 people, including women and children in multiple families lost their lives.

2006-03-22 19:20:52.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
ethics philosophy

Thursday March 09, 2006

[ Philosophy ] Nuclear Opinions - or - The High Art of Mocking Morality

Morality used to mean something at the time of the great saviors. Skillful mocking of it has now become high art and fashionable.

Some are advancing "innovative" moral principles, for example:

• (a) The world is divided into friends and enemies.

• (b) Whatever my friends do (no matter how wrong), they have done right!

• (c) Whatever my enemies do (no matter how right), they have done wrong!

• (d) Apply the above principles where you can, and where you don't apply them, say you couldn't. This includes the paranthesis in items (c) and (b) above.

Opinion journalism more often than not will go astray, and take up this high art.

"This tailor cuts and sews," so goes the Persian saying, with no care whether the coat will fit the poor fellow who would wear it. The opinion journalists (M. Ledeen, etc.), particularly the ones who eagerly beat the drums of confrontation with Iran at every media corner and opportunity they find, will spare no effort to produce unreal accounts of what is at stake.

So, we read Richard Cohen (of Washington Post) enshrine the new policy principles (see above) with his sanctification of "Judicious Double Standards."

Mockery becomes more manifest when the joker imposes his own value system on others and takes no heed of the importance of consistency.

Not only does Cohen ridicule consistency of rules and standards, he also believes Iranian leaders must think they should want nuclear weapons, even if they don't. In fact, all Iranian political leaders (all of whom are elected officials, by the way) have said, on multiple occasions, that nuclear weapons do not fit their national defense doctrine. They have held such weapons to be not only costly and unnecessary but also ineffective and immoral, despite what Cohen would rather have Iranian leaders believe.

But facts and what others say matter little to opinion makers who are bent towards conflict, specially one that promises, if it ever happens, to be far more costly for the future of the West than for what will become of Iran, not in a physical sense, but in a wierd moral sense.

Here, I could choose at random and analyze every sentence in Mr. Cohen's rhetorical column, show its deep injustice and prove it false based on real events and facts but I have a day job to do and need some evenings to spend with my family instead of blogging.

I do have one quick advice for him to improve his rhetoric. The moral principle he should enshrine is not that double standards are good policy and should be defended but that different cases need to be measured according to their context.

However, all measurement, even if sensitive to the context of a case, will eventually require the same moral foundation, compass and measuring stick, and Mr. Cohen seems to posses only one very rusty and biased measuring tool in his toolbox — the one summarized in the first part of this essay.

Charged adjectives and accusations, deployed using the highest rhetorical techniques, may have a university campus quality but they can hardly turn halucinations into reality.

The moral that "whatever my friend does is right" is far lower in its value as a measuring stick and a guiding principle than the golden rule of reciprocity that says "treat others as you would like to be treated yourself" — in other words consistency on a very personal, deep level — "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you" (Gospel of Matthew 7:12 of the Christian Bible). (Unfortunately, when I re-examine the situation, I see that even this principle has been misinterpreted by some towards violence.)

What a great guide consistency can be and how far away, from where Mr. Cohen is taking us, it is!

Poor logic and poor facts when combined with good rhetorical skills — not once, but since the time of Alcibiades, have together dragged the great into wars, some ending like Melos, others like Syracuse!

2006-03-09 05:42:41.0 -- Comments [2] ; Permalink ; Trackback.
ethics history logic philosophy

Saturday December 10, 2005

[ Philosophy ] Collective Goods and Group Members

Our understanding of how groups and organizations operate has significant influence on how we talk about a company, a cartel, an oligopoly, a standards organization or any other group with a collective interest. Successful groups and organizations, whether it comes to a company, an open source software community or a family, have become successful because, among other important needs, they have addressed the inherent tensions between individual and group purpose.

There are many ways to look at this tension between the member and the group. Here, I should note that religion, at its core, seeks to resolve the apparent contradictions we face in life, including the most significant aspects involving the tension between the community and its members. Religion achieves this resolution through various practices and rituals including ones that govern commerce, compassion and caring. However, resort to such harmony cannot always be available and seems to have escaped many a modern human being. The interested reader should turn to Kierkegaard, who was among the first to realize this "modern" affliction.

Organizational theorists have explored and contrasted the individual and the group purpose from other, more philosophical perspectives.

In my most recent entries, I've pointed the reader to Etienne Wenger's Communities of Practice. Wenger has focused on the "what" and the "how" of participation within communities. Wenger's point of departure involves his interest in the connections between learning, identity, community and practice. (These are all near and dear to Open Source software development.)

There were others, prior to Wenger, who were interested in other characteristics of organizations and their members.

For example, Chester Barnard outlined the conflicting interests of the individual and the organization, noted the difficulty of measuring motivation, suggested the diversity and importance of incentives, individual integrity and informal social groups within the background of a formal organization. (Of course, my reading of Chester Barnard's The Functions of the Executive, although physically complete for the first time, is hardly fresh. Perhaps if I read these books for a living and if I were an academician, I would be more careful and conservative when it came to commenting on his and others' works but there are noticable contrasts that come to mind which might be useful to record and share.)

Currently, I'm also continuing my sporadic reading of The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups by Mancur Olson. While Barnard was moved by the problem of satisfying individual purpose within the context of an organization, Olson sought to find when individuals would stay away from collective action involving public (group) goods. When would members of a group fail to act to obtain a valuable good for the group? The group could be, for example, a corporation and the public good could be the successful (and presumably moral) generation of larger revenues through provision of better goods and services.

Here, I'll quote from page 45 of Olson's book, where he underlines the significance of the number of members in a group when it comes to the group's ability to obtain a collective good —

Whether a group will have the possibility of providing itself with a collective good without coercion or outside inducements therefore depends to a striking degree upon the number of individuals in the group, since the larger the group, the less the likelihood that the contribution of any one will be perceptible. It is not, however, strictly accurate to say that it depends solely on the number of individuals in the group. The relation between the size of the group and the significance of an individual member cannot be defined quite that simply. A group which has members with highly unequal degrees of interest in a collective good, and which wants a collective good that is (at some level of provision) extremely valuable in relation to its cost, will be more apt to provide itself with a collective good than other groups with the same number of members . . . The standard for determining whether a group will have the capacity to act, without coercion or outside inducements, in its group interest is (as it should be) the same for market and nonmarket groups: it depends on whether the individual actions of any one or more members in a group are noticeable to any other individuals in the group. This is most obviously, but not exclusively, a function of the number in the group.

In closing, it is worth noting that Barnard, in The Functions, had already realized not only the effect of the number of members on group dynamics but also the problematic of perceiving member contribution to the attainment of collective purpose.

So, why do we watch group sports? Could be because it is one sure place where individual contributions are most obvious to see and perceive?

I know I watch group sports for far more interesting reasons — skill and beauty of group interaction and flawless execution come to mind immediately —

2005-12-10 23:41:19.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
collective economics groups individual philosophy

Friday December 09, 2005

[ Philosophy ] Why We Need to Learn about Learning

We need to learn about learning because never before have we "meddled with it on the scale on which we do today," to borrow Etienne Wenger's words —

For many of us, the concept of learning immediately conjures up images of classrooms, training sessions, teachers, textbooks, homework, and exercises. Yet in our experience, learning is an integral part of our everyday lives. It is part of our participation in our communities and organizations. The problem is not that we do not know this, but rather than we do not have very systematic ways of talking about this familiar experience.

In his book, Wenger focuses on disclosing a new, systematic way of talking about the familiar experience of learning in "communities of practice" by way of finding meaning and identity through "participation". One should probably also think about knowledge networks.

2005-12-09 00:26:30.0 -- Comments [5] ; Permalink ; Trackback.
community learning philosophy

[ Philosophy ] Communities of Practice, Learning, Meaning, and Identity

I've begun reading Etienne Wenger's Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity.

I ran into this book while reading John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid's Social Life of Information, about which I've written here earlier. I've always been interested in how social groupings and organizations learn, evolve, prosper and survive, how we learn and work, and how we come to be who we are as individuals.

Wenger's book would be a good start for whoever wants to explore these topics. Wenger is also deeply interested in building the conceptual framework that will help with the design of organizations, artifacts and processes.

Wenger's ambitious enterprise suits the practitioner as much as it stimulates the theoretician. As the book plate says, the material "is presented with all the breadth, depth, and rigor necessary to address such a complex and yet profoundly human topic."

2005-12-09 00:13:05.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
community education information learning philosophy practice social